And to go anywhere that I please
2002-10-06 || 11:20 a.m.

I just wrote this brilliant entry in my head whilst I was in the bath. I'm going to attempt to capture some of its essence but it is a shame these diaries do not have a telepathic link.

I started off thinking about Rebecca's friends. One of them, a guy called Stuart, keeps stealing things from my house. I'm truly not materialistic at all (despite my rant yesterday) so if he wanted the stuff I'd happily give it to him but I'm not keen on him stealing it. Then I thought about how hypocritical this is, given his age and my fucking awful white middle class behaviour regarding morals at his age, so I thought maybe I'd write about that.

During the summer holidays before I started secondary school I took to sleeping in the playroom on an airbed. One night I had a dream that when I started school I would make friends with a girl called Lisa. This did actually happen. It may well be that this was my first so-called 'prophetic' dream, I always tend to think of the more stunning plane crash ones as being my first dreams of this type but probably it was this one. Anyway, I wasn't friends with her for long. She seemed nice enough but she was a terrible snob and I don't think I was good enough for her. I sort of drifted that first year as far as friends go. It was strange because from playschool and right through primary school I'd always had one best friend. Yes, I was that girly. I cannot remember meeting Caroline but we were definitely already best friends at playschool. She was my total opposite. She was bossy and I was very shy. She was small for her age and I was very tall and thin. She was all pink and white with this lovely shoulder length blonde hair and I was very pale with very long dark brown/black hair. She never had a hair out of place, she was very neat and tidy and always clean and she always smelt clean. I was pretty much neglected as a child, I was only allowed a bath once a week because my mum had better things to do with her time. I wore the same clothes quite often which got grubby and my hair would often be straggly and greasy. But me and Caroline were best friends.

But I cannot remember meeting Caroline. Sarah I do remember meeting. It was possibly the day we moved house or very soon after. I was sitting on the front door step playing with, of all things, some pink plastic poodles. I think I was arranging them for a dog show or something. Sarah came marching down my front garden in her brownie uniform. She asked me what I was doing and I told her and asked her if she wanted to play. She did. She was older than me. I wasn't old enough for brownies. When she got back from brownies that evening she came round to see me. There I was, still sitting on the front door step playing with those fucking pink poodles. She gave me a sweet she had won and saved for me. She became my best friend at home as opposed to school.

Me and Sarah used to fight a lot over reading. We were both totally vociferous readers. If she came to my house she would pick up a book and start to read. I would begin to get annoyed and start to poke her and pinch her and then to kick and punch telling her she had come to play with me and to put the book down. Invariably she would march off home taking the book with her. I would do the same to her but I was never bold enough to take the book with me.

My mum's tempers were legendary. I was round Sarah's house one day and we were arguing over a book and Sarah came back into the room with a bowl of cold water just about to tip it over my head. Her mum stopped her, reminding her of my mum who was not averse to marching round people's houses and telling their kids off. How fucking embarrassing.

Sarah's mum once said to Sarah that I had a certain way of looking at her that made her think I was a bit 'witchy'.

When I was a teenager I had a dream that I had a third nipple. Aren't you supposed to suckle the devil's spawn from a third nipple?!

This is all a LONG digression.

Basically what I was going to write about was my addiction to shop lifting when I was 13. It was once I made friends with Claire at the Grammar. She was totally fearless and would do anything for a laugh. I was totally reckless and didn't care what I did anyway. We went shoplifting in Bromley High Street. We had three carrier bags full of stuff when we were caught. The store detectives were extremely harsh with us, calling us spoilt little white middle class bitches. We were too young to be arrested and that was the reason we were doing it. 14 we had already decided was our cut-off age for it because neither of us wanted a criminal record. Our street cred went sky high and most decent people at school would not talk to us. Me and Claire were not allowed to be friends anymore. But of course we still were. It was just all so terribly exciting at the time. The best fun I had was at Claire's house which was extremely large and we would climb out of her bedroom window and climb onto her roof and lay back across the tiles staring at the sky. Then we would go for a walk across the tiles. It was fucking scary. We would travel all across her house and hear what people were doing in the rooms below.

There are so many things I've done in my life that I could have been killed doing. So why am I still here?

And really I don't like Rebecca's friend Stuart because I see a lot of me in him.